How much ...

Everything is different: for a brief moment, New York is no longer defined by its soaring pinnacles or the stern walls of concrete, steel, and glass that line its avenues. It is a place of small miracles. Neither the straight lines of skyscrapers nor the clear structures of the street grid channel the beholder’s gaze. At this moment, everything is transformed, everything is indistinct and uncertain. When the German photographer Wilfried Bauer (1944–2005) visited the city on the Hudson for a reportage more than three decades ago, a vulnerable and tender metropolis revealed itself to his lens. Amid so much grandeur, Bauer homed in on the small detail: puddles on a sidewalk, possessions abandoned by the street. In long exposures, he picked up on the unregarded still small moments in the city’s life. When the series of black-and-white shots first ran in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung’s weekend magazine in 1984, each picture seemed like an urban poem.